Posts by Ian McNee

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ROTM

This is clearly another sign that the Cylons are preparing their attack on humanity: Roper, and before him Sclavos, discovered that the Cylons are in control of everything that secures the internet. Therefore they had to be disposed of. They now have the means to control the whole human race: (i) online shopping (all females); (ii) net pR0n (all males). It's all in the tea leaves, just stop using the evil monstrosity that are tea bags!

Incidentally amanfromMars has known about this all along but is he our Dalek Caan or Gaius Baltar...

Holy turdspurt Batman...

There are at least three different issues going on here, mixing them all together and then ranting about the unholy mess just makes you look dim. Let's try to unravel them...

(1) lots of people have been stealing copyrighted material on-line for quite a while now, to the point that some people now feel that it is their god(TM)-given right to do so. Wrong. We just happen to be around at one of those junctures in history where the new medium is taking over from the old and this new Wild West Frontier will be tamed at some point and it will become difficult/pointless/socially unacceptable for large numbers of people to continue to steal copyrighted digital media;

(2) the BPI are a bunch of shites represtenting the old attitudes of the media megalo-corps that our money belongs to them and that they should have to provide us with as little quality product as possible in exchange. Wrong. As the ongoing demise of DRM in music shows, media companies will eventually (slowly and kicking and screaming in most cases) have to provide quality usable product at a reasonable price as a more effective strategy to combat piracy;

(3) spineless shortsighted ISPs like VM think they can continue milk their customers like cash cows providing the bare minimum of service and not looking beyond the antiquated all-you-can-eat fixed price broadband model that is slowly failing as the sums don't add up any more. Again wrong. As with (1) and (2) the ISP business model will have to evolve (whether that means music ISPs, metered broadband or whatever) and the dinosaurs like VM will become extinct.

To all those comments about how wonderful Typhoon, Churchill, Blighty, etc. ad nauseam are...

...you're missing the bleedin' point. All these extortionate willy-waggling big boys toys (like Typhoon, the Trident replacement, etc.) offer are bragging rights/junkets/backhanders for politicians and top brass while the execs and shareholders of arms companies laugh all the way to the bank. The same execs and shareholders of the 'British' arms industry are the same people who are bellyaching about paying British taxes when they already pay less pro rata that a cleaner on minimum wage.

And if we don't have platinum plated fighters or bigger glow-in-the-dark nukes we're going to be vulnerable to the Russians and the Chinese? I'm sorry but watching a bunch of 007 movies hasn't raised your grasp of geo-politics and economics above the infantile.

And even if we make these fabulously futile weapons ourselves do you think that the USA would allow us to use them *even* if our spineless politicians decided to stand on their own two feet and take a different line from the yanks? More likely we will just be acting out our usual role as the convenient junior arm of US foreign policy and paying through the nose for the pleasure.

And as for all that bollocks about British jobs in the arms industry: those are some of the most expensive jobs in the British economy (with the possible exceptions of the royal family and those chaps who hand-make wallpaper for the Lord Chancellor's office) and if the money were invested in public services and manufacturing unemployment would be slashed and we might see the beginnings of a country we could be proud of.

Hmmm....£25+bn....

....wtf are we spending all that money on these flying phallic extensions for? With all that money we could buy enough friends around the world to avoid having any stupid wars and still have change left over for a teaching hospital in every large city, more pies than Prescott can regurgitate in a year and a taxi ride home.

Subtilior: Canada awaits, bye! :)

But on a more serious note the Torygraph article states that Canada wants our management consultants! As the saying goes: every proto-racist ignorant nostalgic diatribe has a silver lining. Or sumfin like dat, innit...

A yard of flying boob?

Dearest Lester

Did you not challenge Prof Lawson re. the assertion that "a D-cup in a low-support bra can travel as much as 35 inches up and down during exercise"? If this were so such jubs could potentially become deadly weapons and ought to be banned from our streets along with other jihadi-paedo-terror activities like taking photos and walking the streets with your eyes open in the presence of minors.

So a little bit of satire at Bush's expense is comparable with Bush's crimes against humanity? Ask the relatives of those who have died in Abu Ghraib or those 'extraordinarily rendered' to be tortured in third countries or the parents of sick and dying Iraqi children living in streets running with raw sewage and no access to medical services. Personally I think Dubya (and Blair, Rumsfeld, etc.) should be locked up - but only after due process and a fair trial, a right that they have taken away from so many others.

@Paul Stephenson

Being a long-standing VM customer I can reassure you that they have not been head-hunting government dorks, lusers and arrogant incompetent gimps: VM seem to have an endless supply of these. Something to do with their 'pay them peanuts' remuneration package and 'mushrooms' HR policy (keep them in the dark and feed them sh*t) for their staff.

The only area they seem to spend money on real talent seems to be in their ad campaings. Unfortunately I never seem to get replies from either Uma Thurman or Samuel L Jackson to my complaints about their antiquated e-mail/webmail system and dreadful tech support.

Not an Eee PC 901-beater

So it has substantially less battery life, is bulkier, noisier (2.5" HD vs. SSD), can't read SDHC cards (this is about downloading your snaps not about expanding your storage space - duh!), only has a single mic, won't do 802.11n and the Linux version isn't available for another month and is the same price as the Windoze version. Am I missing something?

Oh and how about some benchmarks compared to the 901? All things being equal with the 901 having an SSD and overclocking the Atom to 1.8GHz I know where my money is.

I must be missing something...

...but surely it would be cheaper and less tricky to simply make robo-blob a bit smaller than to give it the complex mechanics and spatial brains/awareness to allow it to squeeze through holes smaller than itself.

By the way: 'It would probably be within the rules of the game for the robot to...release a gas in order to "perform a function".' Cunning! A farting robo-blob! I suppose while <Insert emeny/name of current Islamo-terror-jihadi-bod here> is having a good laugh about said flatulent fleshy droid, GI Jane nips round the back and melts him with her new electro-plasmatron gun fresh from the particle accelerator firing ranges at DARPA...

Big Apple Pooch Hoover

No description of the alleged "street-cleaning truck" was given here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/16/mutt_suck_truck/ other than to say "the truck was speeding". Perhaps this was in fact a low-level urban test flight for this new robo-wombat-suck-blow-a-tron.

And what a success: the stealth capabilities made everyone think it was a municipal garbage truck and four-legged-fleshy death was dealt out in double-quick time.

Non-military applications

I'm so glad the Home Office takes IT security so seriously...

Quote: 'The Home Office bods “take information very seriously”. This incident will now be included in a review of the security of its websites, undertaken by the Independent Reviewer of Information Assurance, and due to report back in Spring 2009.'

Must be a very thorough review, already in progress and continuing until Spring 2009. And after it reports it will take no more than (lets be optimistic) three months to fully implement all of the excellent security recommendations. I'm so relieved that leaves such a tiny window of opportunity of about ***ONE WHOLE F*CKING YEAR*** for assorted miscreants to hack the Home Office and pinch our personal data, etc.!

Yep, I'd give up all my personal biometric data to these people. And I'd trust them to not abuse detention without trial. And I'm sure they wouldn't dream of using evidence obtained by torture from people kidnapped by the CIA and taken to Aghanistan, Morocco, <insert name of country lacking in human rights here>.

Another (smug) wanker writes

Andrew wrote: "That wanker has a right old problem on his hands if he downloads a dodgie Java object or Firefox plugin. Easily coded to fuck windows, linux and mac to be fair. Linux/Mac have a console that support unix commands. simple "rm -rfv /" initiated by a bad plugin or java object would nuke the machine."

Care to show me an AV product that procects a PC from the luser clicking before engaing their brain? Care to show me an AV product that is of any genuine security benefit to us Linux lusers/wankers? The only benefit is that it allows us to check that the contents of a CD/memory stick/hard drive/whatever is safe to insert in a PC running a legacy OS from M$.

All flavours of Linux come with a proper firewall and none need AV software. Add NoScript and a bit of common sense with your mouse finger and your chances of being pWn3d are about the same as finding rocking-horse shit on your hand-woven FairTrade Andean mountain goat hair rug or a secure installation of Windoze.

Christpher Emerson: FUD or Troll - you decide! I mean we live in a democracy still, right?

Dearest Chris

Do you really think that Nottingham University has no means of regulating the conduct of its employees and students other than calling in Special Branch? So if Yusuf bin Walahi, mythical employee of a suspiciously dark complexion who has a distinctly sinister foreign accent, turns up late for a work a few times (in his role as Bolt Twiddler Third Class at Nottingham University's School of Advanced Psychoplastic Post-Modern Engineering) then his boss, the Bolt Twiddler General, will get on the blower to the Grand Wizard Witchfinder at MI6 to fit up poor Yusuf and failing that get him deported?

And now for news back in the real world...UK Universities have disciplinary procedures, bye-laws, codes of conduct, etc. coming out of their highly educated butts. Apparently though even the Vice Chancellor at Nottingham University (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vice-chancellor/vc.html) with his his fat >£100k salary does not have the common sense to say: "Has anyone actually asked this chap why he had this document and checked if his story stands up?" He was obviously too busy screaming and drooling in a mad panic when he heard someone say: "al Qa'eda".

Of course this isn't his field, Vice Chancellor Professor Sir Colin Campbell, he's...ermm...oh...a lawyer! Right...well I guess this isn't his area of expertise in the law, I doubt he's served on any bodies that would give him any insights into this kind of matter...ahhh....*ahem*...like the Standing Advisory Committee for Human Rights on Northern Ireland...oh...I see. Of course, he must be new in his job and still finding his feet, that'll be it...ummm...you say he's been the Vice Chancellor at Nottingham University since 1988...well...indeed.

SHOCK-HORROR! Asus offer less RIP-OFF in Rip-Off Britain than other IT companies...

Is this The Daily Wail? Let me see...so the more powerful and higher spec 900 offers almost as much battery life as the old 701 - I can see plucky British punters shaking their cloth caps in outrage in the streets and kicking their whippets in frustration.

*yawn*

Really, get over it, what a non-story! Tell me something significant and I my might raise an eyebrow at it. For example: what's the price comparison between an Eee PC 900 in the UK/USA/HK once taxes etc. are taken into account? If the disparity is less than for M$ Fistula or a Sony PS3 then I will remain underwhelmed. If not then I might become outraged about how much we have to pay for this very desirable bit of kit.

Please find something for us to be genuinely outraged about, I for one am not a Daily Wail reader and do not have a big red button on my back labelled "PRESS HERE FOR APOPLEXY"

Re: Whos [sic] to blame

Dear, dear babz - that's utter bollocks. Plod is entitled to use judgement in enforcing the law which is why the Met plods chose *not* to invoke Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 against the protesters at the Scientology bookshop on their turf.

And looking at the YouTube video I would suggest that the cu*tists at the bookshop were more "likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress" than the imposing cu*tist front doors at Queen Victoria Street, protected as they were by numerous City of London plods and a plod van.

This is simply a case of the CoL Inspector plod who was in charge on the day deciding to be a wanker for whatever reason (the article suggests a few possibilities). This is simply the flip-side of things like country plod failing to enforce the ban on hunting with dogs. Yes it may well be a bad law from crap politicians but it can also be badly enforced by plod.

Re: Not sensational....

Umm...I use Umbongo...so I don't have several million best friends. At least they don't e-mail me much. Can you tell me where I can get so many best friends?

But on a more serious note, not being as much of a Linux geek as I'd like to be, what are the implications for desktop flavours of Debian/Ubuntu? I mean we're all using OpenSSL when we're ordering our pr0n and v!@gR4 are we not?

@Joe Cooper

Are you sure Daniel was joking? Surely upscaling from one pixel to a whole movie is the basis of Jean-Claude van Damme's cinematic acting career? Taking that to it's logical conclusion you could probably upscale a sub-pixel to encompass the multi-layered and complex thespian talents displayed in Ms Hilton's screen appearances.

You know what? I think I'd rather just sit here watching the sub-pixel for an hour and a half. Or maybe something less painful still like stapling my feet to the floor with a nail gun.

Never mind comparison with the poxy Mac Plook Spare...

...how about comparing it with a *genuine* alternative like the Toshiba R500. As I recall the R500 comes with the usual C2D goodness, an optical drive as standard, floataway lightness of a mere 1kg and a substantially smaller price tag than this fancy ThinkPad.

Oh and try some real-world benchmarks (if that's not a complete oxymoron) rather than the spurious PCMark05 which is clearly easily skewed by the SSD in the X300.

All very simple really

Yes we get ripped-off by arms contractors because of MoD incompetence/infighting/whatever. The plain fact is that we still spend far too much on "defense". Firstly we spend substantially more than the European average as a percentage of GDP. Secondly (and this is the main reason for the first) our politicians still bear the imperialist delusion that we are some kind of great power that has an inalienable right to use our "defences" to illegally invade (i.e. attack, not defend) foreign countries.

Cut the budget to the European average or less and each time the MoD oversees an overspend take that off of next year's budget. Then we might end up with armed forces that reflect our true position in the world - a fairly average European nation that should neither want nor be able to do anything other than defend itself or make a proportionate contribution to legally sanctioned UN interventions.

First against the wall come the revolution

Oh please! This self-deluding flunkey, his deceased aristocratic (people's princess my arse!) former boss and the losers who follow the stories of these parasites on society as if they actually matter in any meaningful way should all be first against the wall come the revolution. Yes! Dig up her corpse and shoot her again!

Why have royal stories in El Reg anyway? So one loser got flamed by a bunch of other losers? Not an IT story. If his site had been pWn3d by the Hackney Marxist-Leninist Popular Front and replaced with bolshevik propaganda *that* would have been an IT story, just desserts and bloody funny all at the same time.

Poor caroline_h@informatiq.co.uk...

...I hate to think what kind of e-mail attachments and faxes she's been getting as a result of this. Not that any El Reg readers or staffers will be warming their butt-cheeks on the office scanner I'm sure...*ahem*

The Pompous Git replies from The Moral High Ground (tm)...

/set ground(moral) = high

/git:pompous

Graham Dawson: in exactly what sense do you *have* to buy your music from organisations who essentially fund child pornographers (and just to be clear, that means more children being violently sexually abused the more money they get)? Do you have a phobia that prevents you from entering a music shop and opening your wallet to buy a CD? Or of buying said CD for a reasonable price from CD-WOW? Or as others have mentioned downloading from one of the many legitimate non-DRM crippled sources?

Matt: actually if you read the article you will see that AllofMP3 (the old front for Media Services who are behind MP3sparks) was closed down by legal action. And yes you're right that these slimebags and their even slimier-bag ISP AbdAllah should not be fined/closed down/locked up without due process but that doesn't stop an intelligent person like yourself from making an informed decision (Spamhaus, etc.) that in the meantime one ought not to fund these scumbags.

Steve: yep, and in your tee-pee in North Wales listening to your freetard music on an organic hand-woven fairtrade MP3 player made by Andean peasant farmers you will, by toking on that huge spliff, be able to astrally project to the board rooms of Music Megalo Corp Inc to hear their share price crashing and execs throwing themselves from windows on the 50th floor, because you and your freetard buddies spent your giros funding child pornographers rather than multinational capitalists. And then you woke up....ah bless!

And who said El Reg readers were amoral brainless freetards?

Nice to see so many commentators really getting to grips with the issues raised by this article: WHERE CAN I GET MY MOOZIC DED CHEEP AN IT DOWNLOADS REEL FASSSST WIV HI BITRATZ??

FFS! Never mind that the people that created the music you purport to love so much don't get a brass washer from the likes of MP3sparks.com, what about a slice of their profits going to those peddling child pornography and selling fake pharmaceuticals?

No, the likes of the Recording Industry Ass. of America and their multinational media corp. backers are not the good guys. But giving money to a bunch of low-life Eastern European criminals is neither the moral alternative nor a strategy to force Sony BMG et al to change their ways.

Weaker consumer environments?

As always the exec tries to spin bad results. However John Lewis are reporting an overall improvement of over 7% on this time last year led by sales of personal technology and electronics...erm...DSG's core market?

Absolutely Fabulous!

I heard En(ema)damol filmed this event and it's going to be screened as: 'Britain's Next Top Nathan Barley' - I'm so excited I could wipe my arse with Hello!...and I'm so glad that my £120-odd quid license fee is being spent so productively!

One-handed Reg stories...

...I would suggest explains most of the poor typnig, speeling adn garmmer, and this is a classic example of the genre, long may it conintue, longer even than a greasy mouse-jockey with a stash of cut-price spam viagara, a large tub of Flora and a firm grip on the non-mousing side.

As for the comments about Senorita Carolina's sex/gender perhaps these say more about what excites the posters: you protesteth too much? Bless! :)

Time for El Reg Standard Measures Dept. to step in

Clearly Vulture Central is lacking a critical unit of measurement, exposed by this take-down of the much loved and highly esteemed B3ta site. We need an accurate description of the size of an ego.

My opening suggestions are the Prince (Pr) as the standard unit of ego and the pompous (or petulant) Prince (pPr) to signify the more highly-developed and esoteric celebrity-related property: the super-ego.

Rough translation...

What's all the fuss about?

After all, we know from the those documentaries sent back from the future that the warp drive will be invented, boulders on alien planets are made of a substance surprisingly similar to polystyrene and starship captains wear spandex uniforms over their corsets.

Then again perhaps this BIS bash led to that pointy-eared bloke getting the science bug...it all becomes clear! Clever devils after all!

Trust us, we're the health & safety breachers...

So Sir Ian Blair will make sure that the Met will learn the lessons about not pumping a whole clip of hollow point ammo into innocent civilians' heads while using Israeli extra-judicial assassination tactics? Oh I'm very comforted by that.

Will he also be a little more contrite over the allegedly desperate need to extend detention without trial in spite of the fact that neither the Met nor anyone else in the securocracy can provide any evidence based on real cases that it is necessary? We shall see.

Never mind how loud, how hot?

We've had a number of Lacie drives in these Porsche-designed plastic enlosures and not to put too fine a point on it: they fry. And getting a replacement or refund from Lacie for drives that have failed in a matter of weeks is like pulling teeth.

Re: Andy's (and other's) utter rubbish

Oh dear Andy - it must be awful for you to witness the occasional cyclist shooting a red light (cars, vans and lorries never do of course) and pedestrian jay walking (cars, vans and lorries only ever drive where they are supposed to with due care and attention to other road users of course). Would you like some therapy perhaps?

Or perhaps you could wake up and smell the coffee: pedestrians and cyclists are killed and injured in large numbers by motor vehicles on our roads every year, large numbers of motorists are NOT killed or injured by pedestrians or cyclists on our roads every year. These deats and injuries are STATISTICALLY (i.e. not one off Daily Wail hysteria) caused in the large majority of cases by poor driving by motorists.

On a less flameworthy note the use of technical enforcement of low speeds in urban areas by cameras etc. seems less likely to be effective than altering the structure of our urban streets to blur the boundaries between road and pavement as it is in cities like Amsterdam (and has been experimented with in Kensington I believe): this leads to a much more co-operativeand less aggressive culture between road users who have to negotiate their progress and be much more aware of everyone else around them. And no I haven't been smoking anything :p~

W@nker posting via proxy from the desert...

Funny...it's a bit too damp in the UK to be considered a desert. Maybe if your pal Dubya and his chums in the oil megalocorps get their way then global warming will turn parts of the UK into desert though.

Not a bad flame by the way, Anon Coward: some of us obviously touched a sore spot there! Is it the time of the month? The day after Patch Tuesday - always a difficult time for the running dogs of Washington and Redmond.

Let me give you a tip for quality flaming though: while hinting at our Moscow/Google gold connections try to address one or two of the facts in the situation even if just inaccurately and abusively :)

SHOCK-HORROR!

So the White House is more interested in the propaganda value of so-called terror intel than it's practical use in the again war on terror? Gee I would never have figured that one out for myself! I mean it's not like the White House ever fabricated terror intel to justify illegal invasions, extra-judicial assassinations, kidnapping and torture on a grand scale. Oh wait a minute - yes they did and they still do!

Serious Crime Squad...

So...plods from Satfford, Stoke, Newcastle-under-Lyme among others commiting serious crimes to line their pockets. Old habits die hard - perhaps they used to work for the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad before it was disbanded in an attempt to tackle the quantity of serious crimes commited by said plod-squad in the region.

Re: @Separation of powers

"If that was the case it would be hard to avoid the conclusion that the US is no longer a democratic nation" - well done for spotting my point

"Surely that idea would upset a whole lot of Americans" - perhaps but between the large minority who are effectively disenfranchised by poverty and racism and the large minority who do well enough economically out of America plundering the rest of the world (and it's own poor) to not care about anything more than their fig-leaf of a democracy there aren't really enough left to do much about it.

Separation of powers

Oh dear Mr breakfast, must have been a calorie-lite breakfast today, you don't seem to have engaged your brain-box on this one.

Firstly we're talking about the EXECUTIVE interfering with the JUDICIARY - this is nothing to do with the LEGISLATURE.

Secondly we are witnessing the use of a legal red card whereby the executive says to the judiciary: nothing to see here, move along, we've got this all in hand, no need for judicial oversight of the executive, we're the good guys and we know because we've seen the evidence that we're the good guys so you don't need to see it because we're the good guys!

Re: It's the law

Oh yeah - just vote Dubya out: go yanks!

Hey wait a minute...they DID vote Dubya out but then Dubya got his bro down in Florida to fiddle the result (which he had failed to win even after Jeb had got his cops to prevent black voters from getting to the polls...)

It's all coming up roses...

So "Venter is betting on artificial organisms delivering a bonanza for medicine, renewable energy, and anti-climate change efforts"? Break out the champagne! It's the end of history! *cue naff muzak* It is the dawning of the age of Aquarius...

So Venter wouldn't dream of making billions for him and his investors by selling this kind of tech to, say, Pentagon contractors? As if! He has a heart of gold! And there is no way that this could all go horribly wrong by manufactured organisms escaping into the wild and causing an ecological catastrophe. We all know how secure commercial and govt. biotech sites are after all *coughpurbrightcough*

And even if they did escape these bugs will have had their DNA coded so well that they couldn't possibly cause any problems. Right? I mean how hard can it be to code the DNA of an original organism so that it behaves in a predictable fashion in every situation? No more difficult than coding an OS like, say, Windoze - another triumph of monopoly capitalism - and we all know that that never goes wrong in the wild but only in the sad deluded imaginations of Linux lunatics...